The wonderful site for tricks to make your life easier, Lifehacker, has a great recap of thier useful tips, tools, and downright tricky tricks to make a better foto from 2009.

What’s covered? Check out these direct links:

Position Your Tongue Properly to Look Good in Photos

Take Better Pictures by Treating Your Still Camera Like It’s Video

Avoid Mediocre Portraits with These Tricks

Set Up a High Speed Photography Studio in Your Garage

Create Abstract Light Art by Snapping a Camera-Toss Photo

Be A Better Photographer On Vacation

Take Better Self-Portraits

DIY Tennis Ball Photography Stabilization Unit

Shoot Better Nighttime Pictures

Be More Photogenic by Forgetting About the Camera

Breathe Like a Sniper to Take Better Photos in Low Light

Create a Basic Ring Flash

Use Composition Rules to Take Better Photos

DIY Beauty Dish Enhances Your Portraits

Create Stunning High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photos

Create Studio Quality Photos Using Natural Light

Make a DIY Photography Light Box with K’Nex

Take Great Panoramic Pictures with Any Camera

Take Better Pictures by Studying Studio Layouts

DIY Tilt-Shift Photography Lens

Take Awesome Sunset Photographs

Create a Flash Diffuser Using An Empty Cigarette Packet

Make a DIY Macro Lens from Old Binoculars

Not everyone can rattle off the wide world of tech that comes with carrying a camera. Equally, many keep thier camera fixed on ‘Auto’, since they rarely keep learning texts on hand when out shooting fotos.

Salvation is at hand (literally), as Nikon have released the Learn & Explore app for the iPhone/iPod touch. This free app contains tons of  foto fundamentals and shooting techniques, and covers nearly all you’ll need to know about getting the shot right.

Best off (after the ‘free’ price tag) is that all info applies to all cameras, not just Nikon.

Yet another app to make me drool over the iPhone…

[Nikon Learn & Explore App] via [Lifehacker]

Have you done as I have and just recieved/downloaded Windows 7 to get your PC working properly after suffering Vista for the last 2 years?

Good, because Win7 fixes a lot of things Vista got wrong, although they forgot something for us foto folk: RAW support when browsing files in Windows itself. By this I mean opening a folder and seeing the picture directly, not a generic icon.

Thankfully, Fast Picture Viewer is a wee little freeware program that fixes this, adding proper image preview of RAW foto files. This will a preview image to your RAWs within Windows, without having to fire up Adobe Bridge or other such RAW browsers.

I’m probably going overboard mentioning Win 7 so much, as it also works for Vista and XP.

What can I say, the delivery man brought me a Windoze version that works!

[Fast Picture Viewer]

As I submitted some images recently, I searched out a way to apply a sharpen effect to my shots in Photoshop, but unlike Pshops’ sharpen or even smart sharpen tool

(under filters for you noobies), I wanted something I could go back to and modify later, perhaps if I applyed a curve that would require this step back in sharpness.

A Google and further linking later, a High pass option I dig, courtesy of Creative Bits:

1. Duplicate the layer you want to sharpen.
2. Go to Filter>Other>High Pass
3. Enter a radius of 1-10, click OK
4. On your layers palette, set the blending mode to Hard Light
5. Drop the layer opacity until you find the strength you like

Many thanks to elbandito for this handy workaround! =°)